In 2011, a teammate who owed a favor to a Polish journalist asked León to give her an interview. That interview, which was conducted online, led to a few more online talks with the same reporter, and then a meeting at the World League tournament in Gdansk, in northern Poland.
“After four days spent together, we knew there was a special bond between us,” Malgorzata León, who was the reporter, said.
Wilfredo and Malgorzata tried to keep in touch over the internet, but Cuba’s spotty Wi-Fi network made that difficult. They met up at a few more international tournaments in 2012 but struggled to maintain contact.
The breaking point for León came after the World League tournament that year, where he saw Malgorzata and helped his team to a bronze medal on a severely sprained ankle. When he was back in Cuba, he was forced into 45 days of military training, marching and crawling through the mud of the forest with little food.
In 2013, he told Cuban officials he would no longer play for the national team and asked for permission to move abroad. It took a year, until early 2014, for the government to give him his passport so that he could travel to Poland. He played no volleyball for nearly 18 months, then signed on with clubs in Russia and Qatar during the next three years before joining Sir Safety Perugia, one of the top teams in Italy, in 2018.
But it wasn’t until 2019 that he became eligible to play for Poland’s national team, and to represent a country of roughly 38 million people whose populace is overwhelmingly white. León is one of a few thousand Black residents.
He said his adopted home has embraced him. Now he wants nothing more than to bring it a gold medal, building his legacy in the game he loves.